Friday, January 24, 2014

Tooth Be, or Not Tooth Be...

Greetings, WYMOP readers!It's a quick one this week. Something with a little bite. Here's the story:The other day I was visiting the house that once was mine, and I happened to stroll into Handsome’s bedroom in time to catch him with his hand jammed into his mouth, almost to the wrist. That’s a pretty neat trick, if you can do it, and I was about to congratulate him on nearly getting the whole thing in there, you know, kind of encouraging him to learn a marketable skill, when I noticed the paper towel hanging out of his fist-filled maw like a long, flat tongue.

The paper towel had blood on it. And I don’t mean blood; I mean BLOOD! Small spatters large and drops, stains that spread like opening flowers covered the crumpled sheet of Bounty.

He thrust his chin toward the tray-table in front of him. It took me a moment to decipher the gesture, since with his fist jammed in there the act of pointing with his chin also caused him to move his wrist, elbow and shoulder, effectively pointing in four directions at once. I was watching his eyes, though, because the eyes are the windows to the soul, or so they say. Handsome’s soul was staring in the same direction his chin was pointing, so I sighted along his jutting jaw and found the focus of his stare.

Two teeth lay upon the tray: Molars, apparently ripped from the living head of my bleeding boy.

Yuck.

He had mentioned a loose tooth, but I hadn’t known there were two of them, and what with them being far in the back of his mouth (out of sight, out of mind!) I’d forgotten it entirely. The paper towel, I realized, was being packed into the new holes in his head to try to stop them leaking.

Good luck to him, I thought, getting a peek in there when he pulled his hand out to re-position his grip on the paper. The holes looked roughly the shape and size of car tires. Just a pair of those doughnut little replacement tires rather than some sort of Monster Truck tires, it was true, but still — something could have fallen in.

I looked down at the twin blocks of enamel, one slightly larger than the other, and a thought struck me. A question, really. I thought fast, wanting to phrase it properly but still trying to take advantage of his current disgusting distraction.

“So… you’re the boy who decided a couple of years ago he didn’t believe in Santa, right?”

He wrinkled his face in confusion — an easy thing to do when you have your mouth open as far as he did, and nodded.

“So… uh… how do you feel about the Tooth Fairy?”

His eyes shot back to the evicted chompers, and I saw those windows to his soul flicker, then light up like someone had just opened the refrigerator. He pulled his hand out of his mouth, leaving the staunching rag in place. His eyes grew round and his voice rose up into a register he’s not used naturally in more than four years. Mimicking the voice of his six-year-old self (with an accuracy that’s spooky sometimes), he spoke as clearly as he could without dislodging the towel.

“Oh! I love her!”

Greedy little tooth-pulling bastard.

Anybody know the going rate for a couple of milk-molars in good condition?Talk to you later!...and for something completely random, here's a little song that got stuck in my head one weekend while Handsome was staying with me. I sang it to him for two days. In the voice.

Yeah, I AM a Marvin the Martian fan, but I kind of hate the direction the newer Looney Tunes cartoons have taken -- and the boy agrees. He'd much rather see some of the classic stuff, even if he has to go find it on You Tube, rather than watch something put out in the new millennium.

My heart leaps whenever he voices this point of view. The fact that "The Phantom Tollbooth" was one of his favorite movies when he was younger also causes my pump to go all Baryshnikov.